


The Worst of a Bad Job

by certain_as_the_sun



Series: How to Train Your God of Mischief [10]
Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Loki is Toothless, Pranks and Practical Jokes, The Avengers (2012) Never Happened, The twins find out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:20:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27123094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/certain_as_the_sun/pseuds/certain_as_the_sun
Summary: The twins meet Loki. Berk may never recover.
Relationships: Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III & Loki (Marvel)
Series: How to Train Your God of Mischief [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/428851
Comments: 4
Kudos: 73





	The Worst of a Bad Job

**Author's Note:**

> Me, remembering this series exists: I should write some more of that. It's been a while since I updated it.  
> Me, seeing the last story's publication date: What do you mean it's been three years???!!!
> 
> Sooooo, er, sorry for the wait? This is set a few years before _What Friendship Isn't_ and about a year before HTTYD2, since I wanted to write something light-hearted and anything set after either would inevitably be angsty. I planned to write a story about Loki and the twins ages ago. Better late than never ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

It was entirely the twins' fault. If they hadn't started worshipping Loki, they would never have thought of celebrating Loki Day for a whole month. If they had never celebrated Loki Day for a whole month, Loki himself would never have decided to reveal himself to them. And if Loki had never revealed himself to them, the Fiasco would never have happened.

There had been many fiascos in Berk's history. Hiccup would always capitalise this one to distinguish it from previous, lesser fiascos. No matter how bad they were none of the previous, lesser fiascos had demolished half of Berk or destroyed every boat in the harbour.

"I'm not angry," he said. It was technically true; he was still too confused and horrified to be angry yet. "I just want to know what happened."

Loki had the decency to look mildly ashamed. "There was a miscalculation."

Hiccup looked at the pieces of wood floating in the sea, all that remained of the boats that had been there only an hour ago. Then he looked at the ruins of people's houses. Finally he looked at the statue of Thor lying in pieces amidst the ruins. The twins peeked out from behind it, saw him, and dived back out of sight. Their dragon sat on top of Thor's head, unconcerned by the angry glares the villagers were giving it.

"Miscalculation," Hiccup repeated. A miscalculation was adding too much salt to soup, not mass destruction like this. "What _happened_?"

* * *

It all started, as so many things did, because Loki was bored. And because the twins were the only people in the village who worshipped him out of genuine respect — even though they were technically worshipping his mostly-fictitious mythological counterpart. In Asgard Loki had been an afterthought at best. When mortals worshipped the Æsir, they worshipped Odin and Thor first and Loki was lucky if he got any share of their worship at all. It made a nice change for someone, even the irritating twins, to place him above his not-family.

He had no plan in mind when he revealed himself to the twins. Whatever else could be said of them they were sure to make life more entertaining. And they would gladly prank others to impress him. (As long as he didn't let them know he had spent several years trapped in a dragon form. And above all as long as he didn't let them know Hiccup had once shot him down. They believed he had deigned to come down from Asgard specifically to see them, his devoted followers, and Loki was happy to let them keep believing that.)

At first their antics were as amusing as he'd hoped. True, none of their pranks were particularly noteworthy. Rather childish, in fact, like dyeing everyone's clothes pink and painting rude words on other people's dragons. (The dragons took that very calmly, to Loki's surprise. Anyone who tried to paint anything on _him_ would have very quickly found themselves missing an arm.) But life in Berk was much more lively since he first spoke to the twins.

Too lively for some people. A steady stream of annoyed villagers stopped at Stoick's house with complaints about the latest prank. Hiccup looked suspiciously at Loki with every new story.

"You have something to do with this," he said.

Loki just shrugged. "I'm not doing any of it myself."

Hiccup did not look convinced.

* * *

Astrid was even less convinced. "The twins are doing all of this in your name. They're boasting about how the Bifröst opened right in front of them and you spoke to them surrounded by fire."

Years of lying and being lied to meant Loki could keep a straight face when hearing something he knew was nonsense. He didn't even blink as Astrid continued to recount the story the twins had told her. Yes, he had used a few magic tricks to make a dramatic entrance. That was vitally important when pretending to be a god descending from Asgard. But he hadn't made anything resembling the Bifröst, and he certainly hadn't conjured up fire. He loathed the stuff — an unfortunate inheritance from his birth family.

At last Astrid ran out of breath. Loki politely waited until he was sure she had nothing else to say.

"Why would I need the Bifröst when I'm already here?" he asked rhetorically.

Astrid gave him a suspicious glare. "Are you pretending you have nothing to do with this?"

"Oh, I'm sure they're doing all this in my name. Yet you invoke Odin when in danger, and you aren't personally acquainted with him." He spared a minute to be devoutly thankful for that. "Why should I have anything to do with it?"

He might have been less dismissive of her questions if he knew what the twins were planning next. Or rather what they _weren't_ planning, because neither of them had the intelligence for anything that took much thought, but what they would do anyway when the impulse struck them.

* * *

"Your ideas are so stupid," Ruffnut complained.

Tuffnut tossed a spoon in her general direction. "Hey! Yours are stupider!"

For several minutes the twins forgot about stealing cutlery in favour of fighting. When they calmed down Ruffnut continued her complaints.

"We need to do something really impressive or Loki will be disappointed in us! This just isn't good enough. Everyone has to be amazed by our pranks. We've got to do something so awesome it goes down in history!"

Tuffnut scoffed. "How are you going to do that, genius?"

Ruffnut looked over towards the temple. "Loki doesn't like Thor. You heard what he said about him. So why don't we do something and blame it on Thor?"

Any more sensible person would have baulked at the idea of blaming something on a god. Especially when they had solid proof that yes, the gods existed, and yes, they took an interest in human affairs. If Loki could show up in Berk, so could Thor. Even the most irreligious person would be wary of framing someone who could drop Mjölnir on their skull. Unfortunately neither of the twins were sensible. Nor did the thought of an angry god appearing on their doorstep faze them, not when they had a different god to impress.

They tossed aside all their stolen cutlery and set off for the temple.

* * *

The disaster would never have happened if not for three things. First, the twins asked Loki for stories of Asgard. He happily obliged, picking the stories that made himself look good and everyone else — Thor in particular — look like imbeciles at best. Second, he made no attempt to hide his scorn for Thor and Odin. Third, the village stonemasons had just made a new statue of Thor and hadn't decided where to put it yet. They left it standing outside the temple door for days while they debated the matter. It was much too heavy for anyone to move on their own, and why would anyone want to steal a statue of a god anyway?

Not even Ruffnut and Tuffnut were stupid enough to move a stone statue without help. They waited for a warm, sunny day when most of the villagers were away fishing, hunting, out riding their dragons, visiting friends, or not in Berk for whatever reason. They also took the precaution of waiting until Stoick was safely out of the village. (He'd already caught them carrying out two pranks. Neither of them wanted to risk him catching them again.) Then they brought Barf and Belch to move the statue for them.

Alas, they didn't realise one very important thing. The statue was too heavy for their dragon too.

* * *

"We'll need to do more work on the fire extinguishers," Hiccup said, partly to Loki and partly to himself. "Putting them on the roofs isn't good enough. So if we build frames specially for them—"

Loki half-listened with mild interest. Most of his attention was on the corrections he was making to Fishleg's latest book about dragons. The mistakes weren't as widespread as they had been in the past, but he still insisted on overestimating Meatlug's intelligence. Loki, whose dragon form had the dubious privilege of being able to understand Meatlug, could have told him just how wrong he was. Making sarcastic annotations was the next best thing.

_Thud-thud-thud-CRASH!_

Hiccup and Loki jumped up in unison.

"What was that?" Hiccup shouted over the continuing _crash_ es and _thud_ s.

Loki pulled the door open, completely forgetting about turning back into his dragon form and ready to attack whatever was causing that awful racket. He expected to see an invading army or a rampaging dragon. He did not expect to find a stone sculpture of Thor's disembodied head sitting amidst the ruins of Gobber's forge.

Hiccup made a noise somewhere between a gasp and a squeak. "Gobber! We've got to rescue him!"

An outburst of colourful language from nearby stopped him before he could run out. Gobber himself staggered out of a still-intact house beside his forge. Frightened villagers slowly ventured out of the houses they'd taken shelter in. Everyone talked over everyone else. In all the chaos Hiccup and Loki were the only people who saw the twins scurry over and hide behind the statue's head. There was a tremendous _splash_ and the sound of breaking wood down in the harbour, where the statue's legs had just landed on top of the boats. One of its arms lay in the middle of Snotlout's house. Snotlout himself could be heard complaining at the top of his lungs from under the wreckage.

Hiccup turned and looked at Loki. In hindsight Loki shouldn't have avoided meeting Hiccup's eyes. He just made himself look more guilty than he actually was. But even the Liesmith made mistakes, and in that moment Loki could only wonder how this had happened. Since when did pranking villagers mean destroying the village?

Hiccup took a deep breath. "I'm not angry. I just want to know what happened."

How could Loki answer that when he didn't know the answer himself?

* * *

There was only one thing worse than the prank failing so badly: Stoick's fury. No chief liked to come home and find their village in ruins. The twins fled the minute he returned. They took shelter in their undamaged house and prayed like they'd never prayed before.

Loki answered their prayers. He appeared in a flash of conjured light and gave them both his most icy glare. "What did you do?"

Both the twins started talking at once. "We thought— _She_ wanted to blame it on Thor— We were going to replace his statue with one of you— Stupid dragon!— Why was the damn thing so heavy—"

"Silence!"

They fell silent. Loki continued to glare at them. _Leave it to these two to think of something so ridiculous,_ he thought. "You do realise that now I have to repair all the damage you caused."

"We can do that!" Tuffnut said, which was enough to make Loki shudder.

"You will _not_." His home was enough of a mess without these two demolishing it completely. "And from now on you will only play small pranks. Nothing that will cause destruction on this scale."

He left without waiting for the twins to finish babbling apologies.

* * *

The only thing that amazed the Berkians more than their village being destroyed was their village rebuilding itself before their eyes. Within hours there was no sign anything unusual had happened. (Except for the boats. Loki repaired the village because he lived there. He had no use for boats, so he left the fishermen to rebuild them on their own.)

"I suppose this has something to do with your friend," Stoick said grumpily to Hiccup. "The twins insist they were doing all this to please him."

He gave Loki a disgruntled frown. Loki gave him the best innocent expression his dragon form was capable of.

Hiccup shrugged helplessly. "Come on, dad. The twins don't need anyone's help to destroy things."

That was unfortunately only too true. Loki should have already known how true it was. But he foolishly believed the twins would listen to him and not attempt any more elaborate pranks. He discovered how wrong he was the very next morning. So did all of Berk. Everyone woke up to find the twins with branches tied to their arms, hopelessly tangled in a fishing net, and hanging from Gothi's roof. Their dragon was almost completely buried under a swarm of sleeping Terrible Terrors. It seemed much happier with the situation than its riders. Their yells could have been heard on the other side of the island.

Loki stared at them for a minute, wondering how in the world that had happened. Then he shrugged and turned away. They'd gotten into this mess by themselves. They could get out of it by themselves too.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Mike and Psmith_ by P. G. Wodehouse: "There is a certain fascination about making the very worst of a bad job."


End file.
